A new trailer descends from the skies for Lord Of The Rings: War In The North, the action RPG expected at some point next month. A game we do rather make a habit of forgetting about. But that’s a silly thing to do, since first of all, it’s a large scale RPG and there are still too few of those, and secondly, it’s from Snowblind who once created the fun-if-somewhat-peculiar Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. They’ve since been doing some rather odd bits and bobs on console, but they’re back, and this time it’s a cross-platform jobbie. You can see the CGI trailer below.

We’re in the process of sorting out a version without the big, ugly Gamespot logo taking up half the screen.

Phew, that’s better. If not in HD.

Also, for context, I’ve dug out some in-game footage of the game’s combat, with a somewhat less obtrusive IGN logo:

It is some pretty sweet looking character design. I’d not heard of this game before but if the combat is solid this will probably be right up my street, even if the LoTR universe isn’t exactly my first choice of destination if I can help it.

No, they’re clearly suggesting men are not capable of the controlling the awesome power that is magic, that they are nothing but dumb brutes whose only purpose is as a meatshield while the mage charges her uberspell. I feel offended really.

Compare the conflicts of good and evil in LOTR’s worlds to a bunch of people playing and building in Minecraft, where one comes and finds his only fun in griefing..
You got be real liberal to say that the server is for everyone and therefore if someone can only have fun by griefing than he has the right to do it..

In case of Tolkien’s world ERU the admin, who is real liberal says ‘ hm its not good to grief, but i see there are some good things turning out from the ashes..better than if you only built..’

So the ever clashing of good and evil is the sculptor of his world. Its very polar, and therefore leads to some think this is racism, but its really about people having a fight about how Fun to be had! :D

From what i recall Tolkien never specified the skin color of the characters, there is a refrence to the merc’s Sauron uses as “of dark skin” or the like. So you can choose to draw a number of conclutions, presented in order of probability for your convenience:

a) Tolkien was geographically consistent as opposed to racist.
b) Gandalf, Aragorn etc are actually a very healty azn brown and the merc’s even more sun blessed (Yes its cold and bleak which normally would have an impact on skin color in an evolutionary timeframe, but hey – its a fantasy world and tan is nice.)

I’m up to RPS-EWS number 39 – going through them consecutively – but wouldn’t be surprised. Am not amused by these clips.

I’ve just finished reading the LotR books for the second time. Pretty sure dwarves and elves cooperating in the Third Age is almost completely impossible, which was why everyone was shocked at Gimli and Legolas’s friendship.

For anyone thinking ‘but she’s a woman, and she’s a mage, that’s not right, they were only men and there weren’t many of them’ – she’s bound to be an elf. Loads of elves can do magic (see: Glorfindel), so no lore rules broken.

But this kind of active magic, particularly it’s use in combat, is very rare in Tolkien. The elven magic is usually very subtle, particularly in the Third Age when their power is fading. Any major magic typically uses the power of one of the elven rings (such as when Galadriel tears down the walls of Dol Guldur).

Glorfindel is a First Age elf who died (after fighting and defeating a Balrog single-handed) and returned to Middle Earth from Valinor so he’s not your average elf, and I’m not sure what use of magic you’re referring to with him.

“Excuse me would you like to join me in burying my halberd in the humans back?”
“That doesn’t sound very sporting.”
“Yes, you’re quite right its a ra– oh look he’s beheaded K’orfaraz. After you old chap.”

I hope they have more dismemberment options than just the flying head….
I like the look of the Orcs…Elves have cheekbones… I demand cheekbones….In Witcher 2 the elves looked better than any other game…LotR films the elves looked terrible…except Galadrail (bet I spelt her name wrong), but her nose was to wide….the others looked nothing like elves, major gripe for me…

This trailer reminded me of the Dragon Age:Origins intro, (or was it a trailer?) where those few Grey Wardens are killing Darkspawn all over the place. Then again, that’s not really surprising. Now I’m not saying someone ripped someone off or something, just that there are quite a lot of similarities, as could be expected seeing as the story seems to be “A big evil has come, now a ragtag band of heroes must kill hordes of [insert generic fantasy monster here] to destroy the big evil!”.